Project Description
Bond Market Development in East Africa
Securities markets greatly contribute to mobilizing domestic savings for investment in a variety of key sectors, such as housing, infrastructure and SMEs. These help create jobs and support economic development.
However, the securities markets in East Africa are still at a nascent stage. Equity markets are small with few listed securities and low liquidity, while bond markets are generally characterized by limited benchmarks for pricing securities, low liquidity,
rigid regulatory frameworks and inefficient infrastructure.
The objective of this project is to support development of a regional capital market in East Africa, which will facilitate more financing for sectors where long-term local currency funds are
necessary such as housing and infrastructure. The project will focus on supporting development of bond markets at regional and national levels, and work with securities regulators, issuers, individual exchanges, and regional institutions to improve: bond
issuance
processes; secondary market structure for trading bonds; government bond market development strategy; professional investor base and investment guidelines.